Sorry if I came off as being snippy. It's just that the
use of <> and @ARGV is so common
in just about every text-oriented Perl script ever written....
I was just surprised that your experience was so atypical.
It's as if C programmer were surprised to find that if you're
in a while, and you do a return, it
gets you out. (BTW, that was a real question from a real former
cow orker. He's probably writing VB these days.)